ABSTRACT
the breadth of vision and intensely personal originality which Aby Warburg brought to his study of art history was firmly based on a thorough understanding of the standard techniques and skills of his discipline. In this, Warburg was a worthy successor to Burckhardt, whose writings on renaissance art and culture were such an inspiration to him. But unlike the great art historians of Ruskin and Burckhardt’s generations, Warburg relinquished the opportunity to forge a synthetic interpretative framework for a broad spectrum of art. With the exception of his largely pictorial Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg chose instead to focus his activities on detailed examination of a limited selection of very specific examples, often discovered through his own researches. The examples which Warburg selected, and the range of methodological practice and critical perspectives which he demonstrated in their analysis, have been of such suggestivity that not all their implications are yet generally acknowledged.
